Microsoft Office 2008: The Best?

So. Since I had to call “no joy” with Numbers, where at the same time Excel — from Microsoft, I remind you — actually lived up to its name, and Excelled, I decided to see if maybe I had jumped on the Apple/iWork bandwagon with a little too much haste; maybe the latest & greatest MS office was indeed the all-around champ. To the bat cave!

The, uh, bat cave is where I do all my side-by-side testing. Bat cave.I stole the term. From Batman.

I downloaded the trial version and installed. Strike one. I don’t know why Microsoft cannot create a more streamlined, intuitive process for installing their apps. I will say to their credit, that this was better than the Office 2004 install that loaded so many items that rhymed with “crap” to bother recalling, but still: near the end, they throw a dialog box at you telling you that the installer will now search for and destroy older versions of office you have installed.

But, I don’ wanna trash my actual, fully-functional version of Office for this trial.

Your options? “Continue.” Yes. Now when you get the the next screen, in small print buried at the bottom of like the 3^rd paragraph, they mention that just don’t check the ones you want to keep and then hit continue and it won’t delete anything. But, uh, how about — for the sakes of logic and customer stress relief — we just put an option to “Skip” on the first window? Yeah! Let’s try that, maybe? That might work! Might make sense!? Unless you’re Microsoft!?

OK we’re installed. Whew! What a journey. But now we have to test out Word & Excel. So let’s open up some old documents and let’s see what we can’t do with these bad boys, eh?

I open up word, and drop in an image. Quite immediately, and of course wrongly, it puts the image inline with the text. Which honestly I just about always hate, but OK some people like to do it that way (because they were born without a left hemisphere where it counts, but that’s neither here nor there), let’s just fix it. Hey, uh, where do I fix this? Is it in the formatting menu? Can’t find it. In the image elements at the top? No. In the clip art/photos toolbox (editor’s note: Freudian slip I should probably left in: I typed “Foolbox” first time out)? Doesn’t seem to be. OK fine, I remember that I can just right-click it and change it to not be inline… wait, where’s that option gone to? What the f*ck? They? What? How the hell?

Strike three. Geezus, Microsoft. Didn’t you used to do this for a living? The only thing worse, is the cluttered interface. There’s a toolbox, there’s a toolbar, there’s a ribbon (?) that takes up like 500,000 pixels of your screen real estate… it’s pretty gaudy all considered. I thought that the concept sounded kinda cool, but in practice, it’s annoying; you end up with but a corner of the window dedicated to your actual content. You know, that most important part? It gets kicked to the side rather fast. Take a closer look, click the picture at the title of this post.

Peace.

Apple Fails Against Microsoft. Really.

A week ago I had frustration with an Apple product, at which time I discovered that the Microsoft Equivalent was actually a better choice to use.

Scary, I know, right? 

It was a Numbers vs Excel debate. I was trying to load up our invoice from Vonage, and whittle down how many long distance calls we actually make (I used our highest-billed month in order to have a safe margin). The problem stemmed when I tried to copy & then paste the information from the table on Vonage.com into Numbers. For whatever reason, it was reading the Duration column values as time/date values. After being dumb and pretending that Numbers was a Microsoft product and hence looking in the strangest places to find the simplest value modifier, I located the correct place to change the “cell type,” if you will. It imported it as a date/time value, I just switched it to numbers, should be easy enough, right?

Yeah, except no.

It — for whatever reason — decided that the duration of the calls had a start date. OK fine, turns out there’s actually a whole option for Duration. Fine, I’ll fix this up real quick, I’ll just choose to tag these cells as “Duration” values.

Yeah. Except, no.

Try as I might, no matter what I did, that column (formatted 00:00:02) would inherit a DATE, and I couldn’t total up my minutes, because Numbers would not SUM the total time since it was a date/duration mucky mess of a pot of values.

Then, I said “what the hell Russian Roulette is kinda fun” and loaded up Excel. From Microsuck. I waited, and waited, and waited some more, and eventually it came to pass that the program loaded, and it only took long enough for me to have a child and enter mid-life-crisis. OK strike one, Microsoft.

But here’s where the story gets confusing. I pasted the same information in… and it didn’t add in the date. What’s more, I didn’t have to even fuss with whether the column was a “duration” or a “number,” I just hit SUM and it totaled the value for me. Nice. 241 minutes of actual long-distance calling.

I wanted to do a test though. I figured, I would take the data out of Excel, since it was formatted “correctly,” and paste it into Numbers again, see if everything jived. Maybe Numbers just can’t handle 00:00:00 formatting properly when you paste it in, who knows. So I did it. The numbers pasted over, but STILL, the SUM value box showed an error, saying you CAN’T total a bunch of durations or dates.

Strike one, Apple.

Reason #2,104,501 Why Apple is teh Awesome

Not only did Apple repair and return my computer in under 48 hours (time since they received it), but they also did me some awesome favors.

I sent it in for a broken optical drive, right? Yeah, that’s right, now I remember. Apple however, thought that a broken optical drive was therea culpa, and took it upon themselves to do some other stuff for me as well.

I got it back with a new screen & bezel. Nothing broken! I sent it in with a rather clean, scratch-free screen. They claimed there were a few small blemishes, so they replaced it — free of charge.

They also replaced cables. … I have no idea which cables. I’ve never seen cables. But they replaced them — free of charge.

Oh and that’s right, the optical drive; don’t forget that one boys! Check. Oh, and — free of charge.

So. Sent in for a busted optical drive. Sent home with the requisite repairs as well as a new screen, bezel, and cables.

Apple’s teh Awesome, you see.

Reason #2,104,498 Why Apple is teh Awesome

You may recall that about a week ago I was online complaining about a broken optical drive? Yeah, that. May seem like an odd time to to give a reason to LIKE Apple computers, right?

Hey, hardware failures happen. And on an oft-ported laptop where the only moving mechanical part is the optical drive, I can’t really fault them too much. And you may have noticed that I’m back online, no? That’s because of the wonderful experience that is AppleCare, y’all. I called on Thursday (week 0). They had a box on my door the next morning. I had to work so I wasn’t able to ship it out until Monday. Monday it gets shipped out, Wednesday afternoon I have Fed Ex at my door delivering me a box, apologizing for being late.

LATE!1!!!!!1!!elevenTY!! Can you believe that?

Apple, I love you.

Now send me a new 17” MacBook Pro. Stat. :-)

Snow Leopard Update Hitch: it's just not fair!

It’s just not fair, I tell you. I went and spent the money – GOOD MONEY, I TELL YOU – to purchase the new upgraded Mac OS X Operating System, “Snow Leopard.” Wanted to install it on my machine, because I hear it’s supercharged and makes thousands of julian fries and if you order now they’ll throw in a SECOND SET ABSOLUTELY FREE just pay shipping & handling.

Instead, what happens? It turns out that my optical drive has taken a sh!t. I can’t install the damned update onto my computer, so instead we installed it onto The Girl’s computer. Dammit that’s right,  SHE’S got the new cat on her computer, whilst I rot away with the old smelly kitty on mine. 

I had suspected the drive might be bad a long while ago. I was trying to burn a DVD of some pics and movies for an old friend and my computer would not verify the disk, EVER, no matter how many attempts, kept saying the disc was bad. Apparently, EVERY SINGLE DISC IN THE PACK was faulty. Who would have guessed, right? Then when I went to install Snow Leopard, it spit the disk out in the middle of the install. Not once, twice. And a third & fourth attempt just resulted in the computer not even recognizing there was a disk even inserted. It was craziness.

Now, I will have to send it in to be repaired and be without for a couple of days. Why? Because the only certified techs local are on vacation until the 28^th. That’s 11 days from now. I cannot, repeat cannot stand by while the missus has a better standard configuration than I, for a week & a half. It’s just unconscionable.